5 days ago
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
The Islamic Republic Has Taken Iran Hostage
Bartle Bull's piece 'Iran's Mediocre Supreme Leader' (Houses of Worship, June 20) captures the slick phoniness of Ali Khamenei. He is an avatar of the entire Islamic Republic, which is a farce from top to bottom.
The regime presents itself as the guardian of Iran while plundering its oil for an insular few and neglecting to provide basic water infrastructure to the rest. Rather than invest the nation's wealth in its citizens, the mullahs have wasted billions on a nuclear-weapons program. It despises the civilization it claims to lead. For nearly half a century the ruling class has tried to erase the cultural, intellectual and moral foundations of Iran and replace them with imperial ideas about jihadist conquests from Najaf to Karbala. In its fanaticism, the regime even cracks down on the annual celebration of one of Persia's greatest figures, Cyrus II, calling the event a 'Zionist plot.'
